Read President & CEO Beth Babcock's Latest Paper
Sep 21, 2020
Published for the American Enterprise Institute, "New Strategies for Fishing: Coaching for Economic Mobility in the 21st Century" explores how the changing world of work is impacting mobility pathways for those in poverty and how EMPath's work is designed to mitigate those impacts.
It has long been said that if you give a man a fish, you feed him for one meal, but if you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime. In today’s world, that aphorism no longer holds true. The world of work is changing so rapidly that people must complete significant postsecondary training to obtain a job that can reliably feed a family, their skills must be consistently upgraded to retain relevance in the marketplace, and they often must accomplish all this while caring for their families with minimum supports. Today, to feed a family for a lifetime, we must not only train workers how to fish but also coach them in the navigational skills that will enable them to successfully optimize their changing education, career paths, and family needs, for the rest of their lives.
These navigational skills—the ability to think creatively and strategically; solve problems; be a resilient, motivated, and self-directed learner; and have the strong self-regulation and interpersonal skills necessary to work effectively with and lead others—are sometimes called “21st-century skills.” The terminology is apt because they are among the core skills in greatest demand by employers today.
However, acquiring these skills poses special challenges for people most in need of family-sustaining jobs because, as scientific research has unequivocally shown, the special stresses of poverty, trauma, and discrimination directly compromise such skills. And the traditional education and training programs available to those in poverty are still primarily training them for a job (usually those jobs with the shortest training pathways) and not for the 21st-century navigational skills that would allow them to get and keep jobs with family-sustaining wages. Such skills require coaching and practice, especially for people living under the stresses of poverty.
Emerging evidence from a new coaching program, Mobility Mentoring, designed by the global nonprofit Economic Mobility Pathways (EMPath), suggests that incorporating coaching for 21st-century skills into traditional human services programs can create breakthrough improvements in earnings for low-wage workers. It also suggests that such coaching can be incorporated into many different types of programs, can be delivered at scale, and may also have positive effects on other family members.